Thursday, August 14, 2008

 

The War In Georgia

Russia has won a victory in Georgia which is potentially devastating to the United States and could lead to the quick unraveling of NATO unless we are VERY careful how we react. We need to take a breath and think strategically as they obviously have. The hawks are correct that they have won it by goading Saakashvili until he freaked out and poked them in the eye, but by taking Georgia's military apart so utterly while killing relatively few citizens they have avoided widespread international revulsion. Putin is obviously a master strategist.

While blame is a useless exercise, if any one person in the US is likely to be the nexus of the proximate error leading to that victory, it is Randy Scheunemann. And next in line would be his patron John McCain for his ceaseless cheerleading for Georgia. Joe Biden should immediately convene hearings to question Scheunemann and his partner Michael Mitchell under oath about their communications with President Saakashvili over the past year. If they have made implicit promises of US aid beyond what is legally required by treaty, they should be prosecuted for running a rogue "parallel State department".

Others in the line-up would be Bush and Cheney for establishing the pre-emptive war precedents that Putin and Medevdev used so skillfully. For wearing out the army in Iraq. And of course for being arrogant jerks in general, Bush's surprisingly sagacious interview with Bob Costas not withstanding.

For readers who know my politics it might come as a shock that I would definitely put Bill Clinton in the line-up, too. He egregiously blew the opportunity to bring Russia fully into the world community when its citizens were positively disposed toward the US and the west while listening to Robert Rubin and other Wall Streeters who stole Russia blind as they poured drinks for Boris Yeltsin. Worse, he broke Bush Senior's promise to Gorbachev not to push NATO up to Russia's borders.

A pox on all these houses; as a result of their short-sighted greed and narcissism Georgia and its important energy channel from the Caspian region are lost. But now what to do to protect the Baltic states and Ukraine from an expansionist and strengthening Russia? It has most of Europe by the freezing balls since they depend on it so utterly for natural gas and so simply cannot support direct economic or military retaliation against Russia to keep the western oriented former satellites free at this time.

If we in the US want to keep our freedom long-term and that of our friends and allies in Europe we need an immediate and steep reduction in US oil consuption to free up African supplies currently consumed by the US for their use, to replace Russian supplies. That MIGHT allow them the latitude to stay in NATO as we rebuild our ability to fight a large conventional war if need be to protect eastern Europe while squeezing Russia's economic growth by reducing its oil income.

The way to get to that reduction is a $4 or so/gallon tax on transportation fuels to bring our pump price to rough parity with Europe's. Coupled to it should be a refundable tax credit equaling half of the revenue raised in any one year and phased out for people with income over some to be determined level, a quarter allocated to high occupancy vehicle operators (transit, van, and carpool) in cities, new subsidized rural and "far suburban" van service and rail freight capacity expansion and the last quarter to pay for recruits and material needed to bolster the military.

Some very nice side-effects of such a reduction in consumption are that the dollar would rapidly strengthen from the reduction of the trade deficit, crude prices would fall squeezing Iran as well as Russia, and long-term alternative energy changes in transportation necessary to maintain a livable atmospheric carbon level would be strongly accelerated.

Home heating oil would be exempted from the tax because it's a relatively small portion of US consumption and would be unequally burdensome for the northeast.

Europe will need to build LNG terminals as rapidly as they can to replace to the degree possible the supplies they receive now from Russia and accelerate their current pace of development of renewable energy as their parts of the plan. Once such terminals are in place, Russia's income will shrivel further and they will be forced to abandon their military build up and become a more normal country.

Just for the record, I don't want to sound like a John Bircher; I think that overall the Russians have been remarkably tolerant of NATO expansion and helpful in the "Effort to Reign in Nutcase Islamism" (a much more accurate term than "War on Terror" even though it's kind of klunky). We do NOT want to make Clinton's mistake of trying to "defeat" Russia again. It simply can't be done because they have so much resource rich territory, and like all nations, they have a legitimate need to have non-hostile neighbors and to be one themselves.

But with some plan at least roughly like the above we could make it in their economic and security interest to get back on the path to becoming a less-paranoid and more generous member of the community of nations. We here in the US could take some lessons in that, too of course.


Comments: Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?